Nathan “Nick” Abelman spent nearly half a century in Nevada gambling, from the mining camps of Goldfield and Tonopah to the casinos of Reno and Lake Tahoe. Along the way, he promoted fights with Tex Rickard, did business with George Wingfield, counted Jack Dempsey among his friends, and operated some of Nevada’s best-known early gambling houses.
I was fortunate to learn much about Abelman’s life directly from his nephew, William Pettite, a friend of mine for more than 30 years. William shared dozens of family photographs that had belonged to Nick’s second wife, June Pettite, along with stories of Abelman’s years in Tonopah, Goldfield, Reno and Lake Tahoe. Those recollections were supplemented by William’s uncle, Fran Pettite, a longtime Reno resident, casino owner and manager, and chronicler of Reno history.
William fondly remembered walking with Nick from the Abelman home into downtown Reno, where everyone seemed to know his uncle. Occasionally, a down-on-his-luck gambler or casino employee would stop to greet him. Nick would reach into the breast pocket of his suit and quietly slip the man a $50 bill.
It was a small gesture from a man who had spent most of his adult life around gamblers.
Abelman operated gambling houses for 44 years before his death on December 15, 1951. His career spanned an extraordinary period in Nevada history, from mining-camp saloons and illegal gambling clubs to the emergence of the modern licensed casino industry.
Nick Abelman’s Early Life
Abelman’s family came to Chicago from Kovno, Lithuania, and found what many immigrant families encountered there: hard work in the stockyards, along with a city filled with saloons, gambling and corruption.
Seeking a different life, his parents, Harrison and Lena Abelman, moved Mary, Philip, Joseph and Nick to Bessemer, Michigan, in 1890, joining their older son, Abraham.
At age 20, Nick took what little money he had saved and invested in a saloon with his friend Clarence McLean. Their partnership lasted two years. The club offered poker along with bar-top gambling devices, including a Clawson three-pocket jackpot slot machine and a nickel-operated roulette machine.
When his partner’s lease ended, Abelman moved to Detroit and again invested in saloons. But the corruption and violence he encountered there eventually left him looking for a new start.
He found one roughly 2,300 miles away, in the booming mining camps of Nevada.
Goldfield, Tonopah and Nevada’s Mining Camps
Abelman arrived in Goldfield, Nevada, in 1904. The booming mining town was dry and dusty, and automobiles were still enough of a novelty that Nick quickly saw an opportunity. He started a jitney service, driving mine owners and businessmen around town and out to the surrounding mining properties.
Among his customers was George Wingfield.
The friendship would prove profitable for both men. Abelman would become a successful gambling operator, while Wingfield would eventually become one of the richest and most powerful men in Nevada.
Abelman became involved in mining claims, real-estate purchases and businesses with men including Shoshone Brown, G.T. Osborne and Chet Carpenter. He also promoted boxing matches for years with Tex Rickard and helped organize fights involving some of the era’s best-known fighters.
One successful promotion featured Johnny “Swede” Sudenberg and Jack Dempsey. Abelman and Dempsey became lifelong friends.
Over the next two decades, Abelman opened gambling houses throughout Northern Nevada’s mining country. Boomtowns such as Tolicha, Rawhide, Bullfrog, Weepah and Manhattan rose and fell, while Goldfield and the saloons of Tonopah remained steadier sources of income into the 1920s.
Abelman owned saloons offering gambling, including the Cobwebs and Bon-Ton Club. Later, his Big Casino and Tonopah Club became favorites of miners and townspeople.
Nick operated the casinos, but George Wingfield owned the buildings and received a share of the profits.
Wingfield also asked Abelman to put two of his bodyguards, Jim McKay and Bill Graham, to work in the clubs. Both men were capable, loyal and ruthless. They eventually followed Wingfield to Reno, where they became involved in saloons and gambling halls despite Prohibition and Nevada’s continuing prohibition on casino gambling.
Nick Abelman would soon follow them north.
Nick Abelman Comes to Reno
In 1927, Wingfield asked Abelman to move to Reno and help settle the gambling situation in town, offering him a small club as a starting point.
As I chronicled in Mob City: Reno, Abelman brought along his partners Bert Riddick and Steve Pavlovich. Together they opened the Ship and Bottle, one of Reno’s first plush gambling clubs, complete with the prow of a ship facing traffic on Center Street.
The Ship and Bottle represented something different from the rougher gambling halls of Nevada’s mining camps. It offered a more elaborate atmosphere and attracted celebrities, Hollywood starlets and boxing champions, including Abelman’s old friend Jack Dempsey and heavyweight champion Max Baer.
Nevada legalized wide-open casino gambling in 1931, fundamentally changing the business Abelman had already spent decades pursuing.
In 1933, Abelman and his partners moved into the Wingfield-owned Riverside Hotel and took over the small Riverside Buffet casino at 5 South Virginia Street, just across the Truckee River from Reno’s other gambling clubs.
The partners later moved into the main Riverside property at 17 South Virginia Street and managed its casino.
The Riverside would become one of Reno’s most famous and successful casinos of the 1930s and 1940s. Abelman remained involved until selling his interest in the Riverside casino to Mert Wertheimer in 1949.
Abelman’s Casinos in Reno and Lake Tahoe
Nick Abelman was wary of the telephone. He didn’t like the idea of local telephone operators listening to his conversations, so he often relied on trusted associates such as Fran Pettite to relay messages.
Fran was the nephew of Nick’s second wife, June Pettite. He later worked as a pit boss at the Waldorf Club, the Mapes and other Reno casinos, giving him his own firsthand knowledge of the city’s gambling business.
Abelman owned and operated the Willow Club on Plumas Street for several years and had interests in gambling establishments in California. He also became heavily involved at Lake Tahoe, with interests that included the Christmas Tree Lodge on Mount Rose Highway and Tahoe Village during the 1940s.
But of all his gambling properties, the Stateline Country Club at South Shore Lake Tahoe may have been the one he loved most.
The Stateline Country Club
According to fellow casino historian Harvey J. Fuller, Cal Custer legally operated the Stateline Country Club on the east side of Highway 50 at South Shore Lake Tahoe from June 1, 1932, until September 1, 1934.
William Pettite told me that his uncle Nick purchased the club from Custer with partners Steve Pavlovich and Bert Riddick before the summer season of 1935.
Fran Pettite also recalled the story of the purchase.
Custer owned both the casino building and a 16-acre parcel that included a trailer park for travelers and campers. He initially wanted $100,000 for the property. Tahoe’s gambling season, however, was short, roughly 100 days, and Custer planned to return to Southern California.
With Prohibition repealed, his years as a bootlegger were over, and California no longer presented the same risks of hijacking and arrest that had accompanied that business.
Baldy West, Custer’s former bodyguard and by then the gaming boss at Reno’s Rex Club, owned by Bill Graham and Jim McKay, helped negotiate the transaction.
Eventually, Custer agreed to take $84,000 in cash.
The three partners put up the money: Abelman contributed $42,000, Pavlovich $22,000 and Riddick $20,000.
Once the winter snow receded enough for work to begin, Pavlovich and Riddick went to the lake to oversee the property while Nick handled the finances.
Abelman fronted money for improvements that included a new dance floor, nightly bands and additional roulette wheels. The 3,800-square-foot casino offered 21, craps, a Big Six wheel and roughly two dozen slot machines.
When the renovations were finished, the Stateline Country Club opened to immediate success. Nick soon had to return to Reno and his responsibilities at the Riverside, while Pavlovich remained at South Shore.
Riddick later underwent an operation for what doctors initially believed was an ulcer. He recovered quickly enough to return to work, allowing Abelman to spend more time at Tahoe.
For the next seven years, the Stateline Country Club offered big-name entertainment from around the country and grew into one of South Shore Lake Tahoe’s most popular casinos.
From Abelman to the Sahatis, and Eventually Harrah
As I recount in The Roots of Reno, Abelman eventually sold his interest in the Stateline Country Club to brothers Nick and Eddie Sahati for $350,000, along with a portion of the casino’s summer revenue from 1942 through 1945 while the brothers made payments on the purchase.
The Sahatis renamed the property Sahati’s Stateline Club.
Across the highway, a smaller club carried the name Itahas, Sahati spelled backward.
There was still another connection in this chain of Nevada gambling history.
Bill Harrah’s father had been Cal Custer’s attorney in California. In 1956, Harrah purchased the Stateline property from the Sahati family, saying that Tahoe’s casinos were doing twice the gambling business of his Reno casino during the 1950s.
Harrah’s Lake Tahoe casino and hotel still occupies the site, connecting Abelman’s early Stateline operation to one of the most recognizable names in Nevada gaming history.
Nick Abelman’s Final Casino
As Abelman grew older, he gradually sold some of his casino interests and put more of his money into real estate and stocks. But at 75, Nick was hardly retired from the gambling business.
In October 1951, he finalized plans with Charles P. O’Keefe, Evelyn Barret and Nick Sahati to open a new casino on North Virginia Street in downtown Reno. The location, at 232 North Virginia Street next to Harold’s Club, had previously housed the Reno Club.
The partners planned a $300,000 casino, licensed for 100 slot machines, two crap tables, two roulette wheels, six 21 games and a bar.
Abelman was named president, general manager and licensee of the Sierra Investment Company, which would operate the new casino as the Sierra Club. The building itself was under lease to Nick Sahati.
It would have been another significant chapter in a Nevada gambling career that had already lasted more than four decades.
Nick never got the chance to open it.
The following month, Nick and June traveled to Houston, Texas, to visit June’s son William, one of her two sons from an earlier marriage. While there, Nick began suffering chest pains and shortness of breath. He was taken to a local hospital and remained under a doctor’s care for a week before returning home to Reno with June.
Nick spent some time recuperating at home, but his condition did not improve enough. June eventually checked him into the hospital in Reno.
Once word spread that the longtime casino operator was ill, dozens of friends came to visit and wish him well.
On Bill Graham’s second visit, Nick asked June to leave his private room for a few minutes. Behind the closed door, Abelman, Graham and their attorney, William Woodburn, discussed what remained of the group’s “points,” percentage interests in various clubs, along with their real-estate deals.
It was, in effect, one final business meeting among men whose relationships stretched back through decades of Nevada gambling.
Nick’s partnership interests in the Waldorf in Reno and the Hotel Nevada in Ely would remain with June. His points in other clubs would expire upon his death.
Nathan “Nick” Abelman died on December 15, 1951.
He was 75 years old and, only weeks earlier, had been preparing to open another major Reno casino.
The Legacy of Nick Abelman
Abelman’s career began in the saloons of Michigan and carried him through the mining camps of Goldfield and Tonopah, the gambling clubs of Reno and the growing casino business at Lake Tahoe. Along the way, he crossed paths with some of the most important figures in early Nevada gambling history.
He had known George Wingfield when automobiles were still a novelty on Goldfield’s dusty streets. He promoted fights with Tex Rickard and became a friend of Jack Dempsey. He operated casinos with Bert Riddick and Steve Pavlovich, worked within Wingfield’s sprawling Nevada business empire, helped usher Reno gambling from the backroom era into legalized casino gaming, and became part of the early development of South Shore Lake Tahoe.
Yet the family stories preserved about Abelman tell us as much about the man as the casinos do.
William Pettite’s memory of walking into downtown Reno with his uncle remains one of my favorites: a well-dressed gambling man who seemingly knew everyone in town and who kept $50 bills in his breast pocket for someone who had fallen on hard times.
After 44 years in the gambling business, Abelman was still making casino deals almost until the day he died.
Nick Abelman’s legacy remains intact, a remarkable example of what hard work, perseverance and a hearty helping of gamble can produce.